


Surface

by seperis



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-08
Updated: 2008-07-08
Packaged: 2017-10-03 17:15:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seperis/pseuds/seperis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's watched the birth of galaxies and stood beside her at the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surface

**Author's Note:**

> For tzikeh.

He tells her:

"He asked me. I asked myself. Isn't that strange when you think of it?"

And:

"Imagine all of time and space running through your head, like a river over rocks--no, no, that's not right." Then, "Fish and chips. I keep thinking of fish and chips."

* * *

She surfaces from somewhere impossibly deep, listening to his voice flow and ebb against her like the coming tide, pushing against the surface of her skin. "Hungry?" she hears her mother say. "What you need is a spot of tea and a good rest to put things right."

Jackie Tyler never met a world where tea couldn't cure all ills. Rose nods, tongue dry and clinging to the roof of her mouth, and closes her eyes, feeling him curving toward her like spacetime around objects huge and miraculous, like moons that orbit stars so bright they burned her eyes.

She's walked so many galaxies, dimensions that folded like paper for her to travel, felt Time itself thrumming beneath her hands, bowing to her will (not a memory, but a knowledge she carries in her bones). Time isn't water, he's right, but it's easier to explain all the things it's not that what it is.

"I wonder if tea is ready," her mother says, and the words wash over Rose like water.

* * *

"Fascinating," he says at tea, picking his way across the table, trying every dish, long fingers moving between biscuits and sandwiches, studying his tea like it contains the secrets of time-travel (and she thinks, it could. It might). "Did you make these, Jackie?"

"I like to keep my hand in," her mother says and Rose picks at her plate, words bunched together at the tip of her tongue, so many she can't say a thing.

And:

"Dimensional cannon? Really?"

"Quite the inventor, my Rose," her mother says, with a pat to her shoulder that shakes the earth. "Every day, off to Torchwood to save the world. Doesn't eat right," her mother confides while he watches her. "Told her once, told her a thousand times, how will she get a husband if she's nothing but flesh and bones?"

His mouth quirks, eyes flickering to her, a rippling moment of spacetime that bumps her up, breaking the surface of her mind to feel the flush of heat across her face. Her fork slides the length of porcelain and she drops it before she gives herself away.

"Right then," her mother says. "Would you like to see the house, Doctor?"

He sets down the napkin and eyes the last of the biscuits before taking three, nodding as he stands up. "I think I would."

* * *

He tells her:

"He said, I've seen everything that could be and will be, and I didn't see you. I never saw you. Not until I did."

And:

"He told me, you can stand still, and I could hate you for that."

* * *

He maps her flat like the topography of a star, peering into cupboards and beneath the bed, curiosity flaring off him like light, gravity that pulls her into orbit, circling him with her eyes, marking out the differences (his taste, his scent, his taste in clothes), because saying what he isn't is so much easier than believing what he is.

He doesn't touch her, but she wants him to so badly she can barely breathe.

"I like it," he says, leaning against the doorway, already living in the spaces she created for him and never knew it. Fitting, like she crossed the universe, created the impossible just to bring him home.

Home, in a flat that was half-empty and now it's not; something in her begins to shake, pushing her up and out, into a world that's finally still, like Time has finally let her go.

"Not like a river," she whispers, reaching for him with arms that feel as light as air. A human body as mortal as her own, a single heartbeat against her ear, the infinite mind of a Timelord that sees all of time and space in eternal flux clothed in flesh and bone. "


End file.
